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Assassin’s Creed II

…indeterminacy between Ezio, Desmond, and the player. The game manages to produce a real sense effect on the player, that is presumably the very same one Desmond could have felt. Desmond is a voyeur, someone who observes without being observed, but Minerva crashes this expectation in the blink of an eye. Desmond’s identity changes, he is now an agent, directly interacting with Minerva. Game designers obtained this effect with much care, using dialogues and above all Minerva’s sudden direct glance to the virtual camera.

For Compagno, Desmond’s dream-like search through his DNA memories “on the couch” of the…

January 30th

…Blog Marcia discusses philosophies behind and strategies for making independent TTRPG-making a less commercialized scene.

  • Unholy Aisles | Unwinnable Emily Price interrogates the fraught and unsatisfying relationship between labour and products as expressed through three works of popular media and literature, including Wilmot’s Warehouse.
  • Unpacking Presents a Version of Normalcy I Will Never Understand | Fanbyte Jess Sebastian confronts the disconnect between Unpacking‘s Instagram-perfect vision of upward mobility and the increasingly precarious contemporary existence of much of its player base.

    • “I wondered what it must be like to have natural light in every room as…

    February 6th

    …New Vegas.

  • For Commander Shepard, Ignorance Is Access | Unwinnable Ruth Cassidy pokes at the tension between Mass Effect‘s efforts to explore racial prejudices in the game’s story world through dialogue interactions and its priority of always keeping Shepard firmly in role of sympathetic protagonist.

    • “Mass Effect is a power fantasy for the player – and one particularly invested in defining power in strength and influence and agency. Shepard’s xenophobia and its invisibility are both tools to give players what they want: as much access to the game’s world as possible, without the social cost. Their…

    Jaroslav Švelch | Keywords in Play, Episode 20

    …limited. You know, you couldn’t just go into a store to buy a computer, or a console, or video game, like almost all distribution of hardware and software was, to some extent, unofficial. So, when somebody wanted to buy a computer, for instance, they would have to travel, usually to the West. And to do that you had to have a special permit. So, a lot of people couldn’t do that. So, they ask their friends who could get the permit to actually go to the West and bring a computer over. So, it was complicated and it was also…

    January 10th

    And we’re back, with the first instalment of This Week In Videogame Blogging for 2010. Straight to it as there’s a lot to get through, having been off-air for some time, and quite a bit of it has been sent in by readers. It is much appreciated.

    Grayson Davis has two good reads from the past week-plus-change; the first on ‘The Players Role’ and the second on ‘Time and Games’ [mirror] which looks like quite a thorough treatment of that particular aspect of game design. Here’s a quote to whet your appetite:

    I think it’s fair

    …

    April 10th

    …aware it’s a puzzle game, not a story game. So what gives?

    I would like to propose the term Drop7 practitioners for people like myself— individuals who find something more in the game than one might suspect an iPhone game could provide. This essay is an attempt to understand the game’s effect on me.

    Jason Killingsworth at the UpUpDnDn blog writes about creating his own family Tetris lexicon with his brother in ‘Throwing Shapes’:

    When we lived together briefly during college, my younger brother Josh and I played a lot of Tetris. Like a

    …

    July 24th

    …well, efficiently it compels the player to adopt a Taylorist philosophy. Taylor believed there was One Best Way to perform any kind of job, a sort of miracle cure for what ailed the worker, the manager, and industry as a whole. In Tiny Tower, it becomes clear after a few hours—once you are invested enough to start caring about your burgeoning building—that maximizing efficiency, not employing creative strategies, is the objective here. Just as in manufacturing, the work never ends in Tiny Tower; there is no defined end point at which the goal is achieved. There is only more building,…

    September 4th

    …ship on fire.

    Taylor Cocke at Scoreless is working on some more short vignettes of games (remember his Far Cry 2 stuff?). Now he’s doing Deus Ex: Human Revolution.

    Line Hollis at Robot Geek discusses what she terms ‘Leaning Games‘. Their choices, as she describes, are also employed in choose-your-own-adventures and AAA titles, to varying effect:

    What this style really resembles is the story structure found in mainstream games with a “moral choice system,” like Bioshock, Infamous, or Mass Effect. The dead simplicity of the system in Bioshock is a particularly close match. Each Little…

    September 2nd

    I made you an elaborate intro, but the cat ate it. So, let’s just get right into it. It’s This Week in Videogame Blogging!

    On Gamasutra, Douglas Lynn draws a line between the “game” and the “game experience,” citing the latter as a more all-encompassing, multisensory interaction. Over on Video Game Tourism, Eron Rauch delineates the four major types of In-Game Photography.

    Meanwhile, Kotaku’s Patricia Hernandez boldly (and many would say, correctly) asserts that there is no such thing as a game without politics:

    Think, for instance, of player creation in any game. Look at

    …

    December 16th

    …Rivas get together to discuss Canadian-produced Assassin’s Creed 3‘s take on the American Revolution.

    Meanwhile, on his own blog, Jordan Rivas relates how Call of Duty reminds him of a Katy Perry song.

    KEEPING GATES

    We catch up with John Brindle again back over on Nightmare Mode, where Brindle outlines a pretty compelling critique of gamer elitism:

    [Jim Rossignol wrote that] we shouldn’t worry about what non-gamers think of games, because “in this instance,” he wrote, “we are the highly educated elite.”

    It’s a good point. It arouses in me the instant desire to defend…